College-going dalit students teach children of their community
Free classes are held every evening in two villages of Punjab under an initiative to help children from poor families with their studies.
In the campus of a government school under shades of several trees in Chibranwali village of Sri Muktsar Sahib district of Punjab, Gurmail Singh stands by a blackboard and a cushioned chair, with over 40 children sitting on the floor.
Most of the young ones greet him with a fist bump amid a loud chorus of ‘Good evening, sir’.
Singh is holding his class in the open air since there is a power cut in the village, some 200 km away from the capital Chandigarh. Otherwise, they would have been inside different classrooms with two more teachers.
A BEd Mathematics final-year student at a private college in Sri Muktsar Sahib city, Gurmail (22), is among nine Dalit voluntary teachers who take free tuition classes for the children of their community every evening.
Gurmail and two more college-going students teach in the government school in Chibranwali village, for which they had taken permission from the district education officer. While six others, mostly young Dalit women, teach kids studying in Classes 1 to 10 in the rooms of a village Dharamshala in Khunde Halal.
The two villages are less than 5 km away from each other.
Gurmail and the other eight form a rare band of voluntary teachers who have taken on the onerous task of tutoring younger ones of their own community that has historically faced discrimination on many fronts.
“Those who belong to well-to-do families are able to afford tuition for their children in the villages, but not the poor. A poor person who earns Rs 300 a day here in the village spends all their earnings on daily household expenses. Their children often lag behind in studies in the absence of help,” pointed out Gurmail.
Khunde Halal was the village where the noble initiative was first seeded.
It came about after Prabhjit Singh, a journalist, happened to visit the village in 2014.
“I began by teaching some 30 students up to class 8. I also organised football games for the boys and volleyball sessions for the girls,” Prabhjit recollected.
His visits to the village became more frequent. It helped when the English newspaper that he worked with then transferred him to Bhatinda, only a 45 minutes drive from Sri Muktsar Sahib.
When he couldn’t visit, he enlisted the support of some local girls who had finished schooling to continue teaching the children.
In 2019, the Khunde Halal Education and Welfare Society was registered with the Punjab government, with nine committee members, including four from the Khunde Halal village itself and two other journalists.
Prabhjit became the founding president.
A new beginning
The initiative blossomed, and in 2022, it was also expanded to the nearby Chibranwali village.
Now, some 100 children attend the free classes held every evening in the two villages.
The objective of the initiative could not have been nobler. “It is important to bridge the gap between rural and urban people. To ensure a level playing field for everyone, it is important to extend educational facilities even to those living in villages,” Prabhjit said.
According to Prabhjit, conducting free classes has helped him immensely as well.
“Teaching the children is also a stress reliever. They are closest to nature, unlike the city dwellers. They clasp your arms and legs the moment you enter the centres,” Prabhjit said, in between shopping for trophies to be given to the children who have secured top ranks in their respective schools.
The indications are that the tuition classes are working wonders. The number of rank holders among the children attending them has swelled – some 25 in total between the two villages. More importantly, their fundamentals have improved significantly.
“Many of them couldn’t even read alphabets when they joined. Now they can,” pointed out Rekha Kaur, a volunteer-teacher pursuing her own BEd degree.
According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) of 2022, about 24.8% of Class 1 students and 12.7% of Class 2 students in rural Punjab cannot read capital letters.
“Different stakeholders play an important role in children’s learning. The National Education Policy 2020 recommends the participation of the community, alumni, and volunteers in making learning more effective.
Such initiatives are incredibly important, especially in villages where access to quality education may be limited,” stressed Vajinder Thakur, Punjab state head of Pratham Education Foundation, an organisation that annually releases the ASER survey.
“Teachers in the cities give enough attention to the students, while teachers in the villages normally don’t,” Gurmail added. “In our times, there were less number of teachers as well.”
In spearheading the initiative, some of the volunteer teachers have been motivated by their own personal journeys.
“I was in Class 10 and we did not have a mathematics teacher. One Punjabi language teacher used to double up as our maths teacher. I fell short by two marks of qualifying for a government scholarship. If there had been a maths teacher, it wouldn’t have happened,” Gurmail lamented.
The free classes aim to prevent children from having similar experiences.
No stopping them
A shy Yudhveer Singh began attending the free classes in his village Khunde Halal three years ago and topped his Class 4 examination at his regular school with a 90.4% score.
After school, his homework keeps him busy. Though Yudhveer can read sentences from his English textbook, he struggles to understand much of what he is reading. This is where the free tuition helps him.
His father, Tarsem Singh, is proud of the young one’s educational progress. Tarsem, who works as a farm labourer, couldn’t educate himself much because of financial hardships. He is happy that his son would not possibly end up like him because of the free classes.
However, it is not smooth sailing yet.
Most of the children attending the free classes are from families struggling to make a living. Many skip classes to help their parents with the work they do. Even some volunteer teachers work on farmland themselves, sowing paddy to supplement the family income.
Yet, they all trudge along together. They are proud of the initiative.
There is a lot to be proud of, after all. Two of the children who attended the free classes have found jobs as laboratory assistants while another one is now a teacher in a local government school.
There is every reason to wish more power to the initiative.
The lead at the top shows children from Dalit families attending free after-school classes in Chibranwali village in a government primary school (Photo by Sanskriti Talwar)
Sanskriti Talwar is an independent journalist who writes about gender, human rights and sustainability. She is Rural Media Fellow 2022 at Youth Hub, Village Square.
